Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)

The American painter and printmaker Richard Diebenkorn worked on both canvas and paper, masterfully exploiting the qualities of each medium to produce his desired effect. He is most widely recognized for the large scale and luminous abstractions collectively known as the Ocean Park series. In a group of more than one hundred paintings and works on paper, Diebenkorn ceased to focus on figuration and gave priority to the formal concerns of his abstract compositions. In Untitled #8 as in all of these works, the artist eliminates the representational elements but retains allusions to the landscape, creating works distinguished by geometric scaffolding visibly and repeatedly aligned and overlaid with luminescent color. In this work all of the drawn and painted revisions, interruptions, and tensions of decision are preserved, the sections of the paper visibly ruled and gridded, the yellow and blue diagonal snapping in the painting's upper right corner counterbalanced by the mottled, pale rectangle taking up the bottom half of the canvas. The viewer has a clear focal point in the primary colors, but the changes in texture, ripples, and lines, create energy and movement throughout the canvas. Diebenkorn began working on the Ocean Park series when he set up his Santa Monica, California studio around 1967, creating a body of work that included paintings, prints, drawings and collaged works on paper. None of these are considered studies for the other, as Diebenkorn did not believe in preparatory drawings, in fact each is a complete, self-sufficient work. As in Untitled #8 with its pattern of large geometric blocks of vibrant color, the compositions are skillful combinations of color and paint, both architectonic and robust, structured yet loose, moody and also cheerfully bright. Each is a snapshot of a day in the life of the California artist as he committed himself to observing the landscape of the Pacific Coast. Reacting to his California surroundings, Diebenkorn uses washes of color set in a grid, in this case the primary colors dramatically contrasting the absence and presence of all color in black and white and peaking above a large grey washed field below. His armature is loose, irregularly spaced and seemingly incidental, responding perhaps to the myriad shifts and nuances of the California light. Nonetheless the use of line and color in Diebenkorn's work relates to his more representational and figurative works with an astute and heightened sense of structure and space. The entire Ocean Park series displays a range of colors and variation of scale from small, intimate works to monumental canvases.


This work will be included in the forthcoming Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné under estate number 29.